Evaluation of Time-Critical Communications for IEC 61850-Substation Network Architecture

Present-day developments, in electrical power transmission and distribution, require considerations of the status quo. In other meaning, international regulations enforce increasing of reliability and reducing of environment impact, correspondingly they motivate developing of dependable systems. Power grids especially intelligent (smart grids) ones become industrial solutions that follow standardized development. The International standardization, in the field of power transmission and distribution, improve technology influences. The rise of dedicated standards for SAS (Substation Automation Systems) communications, such as the leading International Electro-technical Commission standard IEC 61850, enforces modern technological trends in this field. Within this standard, a constraint of low ETE (End-to-End) latency should be respected, and time-critical status transmission must be achieved. This experimental study emphasis on IEC 61850 SAS communication standard, e.g. IEC 61850 GOOSE (Generic Object Oriented Substation Events), to implement an investigational method to determine the protection communication delay. This method observes GOOSE behaviour by adopting monitoring and analysis capabilities. It is observed by using network test equipment, i.e. SPAN (Switch Port Analyser) and TAP (Test Access Point) devices, with on-the-shelf available hardware and software solutions

Laboratory testing of the communication based protection relays

The proper operation of control and protection applications in Substation Automation System (SAS) demands very high-speed and reliable communications that has being achieved by using IEC 61850. Moreover, the practical implementation and testing of protection scheme requires a communication system that can be conventional or high-speed peer-to-peer communication. This paper presents the evaluation of the performance advantage of GOOSE (Generic Object Oriented Substation Event) message over its conventional hard-wired counterpart for the same relays protection

A Defense-in-depth Cybersecurity for Smart Substations

The increase of cyber-attacks on industrial and power systems in the recent years make the cybersecurity of supervisory control and data acquisition and substation automation systemsa high important engineering issue. This paper proposes a defense in depth cybersecurity solution for smart substations in different layers of the substation automation system. In fact, it presents possible vulnerabilities in the substation automation system and propose a multiple layer solution based on best practice in cyber security such as the hardening ofdevices, whitelisting, network configuration, network segmentation, role-based account management and cyber security management and deployement

Fast quasi-synchronous harmonic algorithm based on weight window function- mixed radix FFT

According to the requirements of IEC61850-9-2LE, digital energy metering devices mainly adopt 80×fr fixed sampling rate. When the harmonic analysis is carried out under asynchronous sampling, it will produce large errors due to spectral leakage. Quasi-Synchronous Algorithm has high accuracy, but the calculation process is complicated and the hardware overheads are high. Based on the characteristics of digital energy metering devices, this paper puts forward a Fast Quasi-Synchronous Harmonic Algorithm using weight window function combined with Mixed Radix Fast Fourier Transform Algorithm. It will reduce the calculation by more than 94%. Compared with the Triangle/Hanning/Nuttall4(III)-Windowed Interpolated FFT Algorithm, the proposed algorithm will perform better in accuracy and has the feature that the more asynchronous of the sampling, the more obvious the error will be